• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, August 21, 2013

Cisco Systems has developed a rapid routing and tagging system as part of its social monitoring strategy that automatically opens a service ticket after detecting a negative tweet or post on the Web. Overall, the process relies on sharing information with the company's search engine marketing team to identify keywords and intent.

A rules-based engine built into the Radian6 platform looks for a combination of tags before generating the ticket and routing the complaint to the correct department. The ticket gets assigned to a Cisco employee who directly contacts the consumer.

"If someone tweets a comment about Cisco on Twitter, and the natural language processing picks it up as negative, or if they include words like '#wtf' or '#fail,' I get an email on my phone in my pocket," said Charlie Treadwell, Cisco's social intelligence manager. "If we have product-related posts, the ticket will include the text from the post and get routed to the specific department."

One of Cisco's firmware updates that forced customers to use a cloud service got bad reviews from a large percentage of clients. The nearly 600 posts on one forum in one day began spilling out onto Twitter and blogs. Within a day, Cisco issued a response and released a way for clients to rollback the changes. Radian6, now owned by Salesforce, helped to identify those negative conversations.

Treadwell said Cisco gets on average between 5,000 to 7,000 mentions on social sites daily. On a good day, when the company announces an acquisition or another big event, that number can spike to 20,000. A physical listening center with big screens supports the program, along with one outside the offices of CEO John Chambers and CMO Blair Christie.

Cisco's social media listening center supports more than 70 company-related Facebook pages and 100 Twitter accounts. Some 240 Cisco employees use Radian6 mobile applications to engage in conversations, according to a case study from Nucleus Research. It has increased productivity by 3%, and avoided 360,000 in annual service and survey costs. The return on investment took about five months; today that annual return sits at 281% for the project.

Aside from complaints, social reports also guide the company's marketing strategies for campaigns by allowing search and social marketing teams to share information. The search engine marketing team feeds keywords to the social team related to products and topics. In turn, the social team feeds search marketing new lists related to social networks they wouldn't typically find for themselves. This allows the company to identify features and technology internal teams should emphasize to customers.

Cisco has been piloting a program that capitalizes on posts in forums looking for product recommendations that eventually lead to searches on engines or sites. The strategy monitors the consumer's intent to purchase, alerting the sales team and generating leads. The combination of search and social supports a transition from phone, email, click-to-chat and posts on Twitter and Facebook that Treadwell continues to monitor.